Swedish driver, Marcus Ericsson, was disappointed having to settle for second place at the Indy 500 after leading 17 laps. The Andretti driver called it “a winner-takes-it-all all kind of race”.
Marcus Ericsson finished the Indy 500 in second place in his No. 28 Andretti Global. The Swede started the race in ninth place and led 17 of the 200 total laps. When headed into the post-race press conference, the moderator noted that he looked disappointed, Ericsson responded, “For sure.”
The Andretti driver continued, “This race is a winner-takes-it-all all kind of race, and I had that race covered. It’s pretty painful. Yeah. It is.”
Passed by Palou in dirty air
Championship Leader Alex Palou caught up to Ericsson at Turn 1 while the Swede was holding his lead close to the end of the Indy 500. The Andretti driver was in the dirty air of lapped drivers ahead of him, which did not make keeping the lead easy.
Ericsson said to the media, “I mean, I had those lap cars ahead, and I was struggling a little bit in the dirty air. Alex got kind of a run on me, but I thought he wasn’t going to go for it. And that’s the thing that’s going to keep me up at night for a while, that moment and what I did and didn’t do. To look back at that — like I said, that’s going to keep me up at night for a while.”
Later on, the 34-year-old noted, “I think the tough thing was those two lap cars or whatever they were, backmarkers, and they were sort of creating this dirty air that made it really hard to sort of overtake there in the end.”
The former Indy 500 race winner acknowledged that Palou was “definitely in an advantage” but he will take this moment as a learning opportunity for next time.
“But that’s the frustrating thing was that I had position on Alex and I sort of lost that, and that is — when that happened, he was definitely in an advantage. Yeah, that’s what I need to sort of look back at and try and see what I could have done differently.”
The team gave it all
At the end of the day, Ericsson is proud of the No. 28 team and what they were able to accomplish together at the Indy 500 with second being “a good result”.
“Yeah, I’m really proud of the Allegra team. We’ve really had a good month, a good solid month, good qualifying weekend.”
“This race was a bit strange. We started out fairly strong. I felt really comfortable the first part of the race, and then my car went really oversteery, I was really hanging on and sort of struggling to keep up with anybody, I felt like, and we had to make a ton of changes. And then we had a bad pit stop that dropped us right to the back field lead. At one point we were last in the lead lap.”
Ericsson’s team is going to dust the Indy 500 off its shoulders, as they kept “fighting through” a not so happy second half of the race.
“So it was really looking like a bad day, but that’s the cool thing with us and with the 28 crew, we keep fighting. We keep never giving up, and we keep fighting through. And that’s what we did today.” Ericsson “I had some really good stints there in the second half of the race where I felt the car came more to me and put us back in contention, and then the last stop was really good, good call on the strategy, as well. I’m really proud of that fight-back.”
Even though second is a strong feat at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the Andretti driver still acknowledges the importance of a 500 win.
“It stinks. Second is a good result, but here it’s not a good result. Here you’ve got to win.”
